In the Suicide Mountains

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In a certain kingdom, in a certain land, there lived a dwarf who had an evil reputation, for he was humpbacked and ugly, with teeth like a saw’s and skin like a mushroom’s, and his legs were crooked and his eyebrows were hairy, as were his nostrils and ears, and the eyes that peered out from the shadow of those eyebrows were as mottled and devoid of vitality as two dead mackerels. It was rumored that he knew everything there was to know about black magic, and that by saying certain spells through his long, bushy beard he could cause an ordinary house to turn around so that its back door faced the street. It was said that when he liked he could turn himself into a flowery valley or a housefly, and that whenever he was angry, or even merely bored, he caused women to have warts and the village priest to get roaring drunk on tap water.

It was all lies and fictions, for the dwarf, whose name was Chudu the Goat’s Son (for his mother had been a goat and his father a magic fish), had all his life scrupulously avoided using magic for improper ends, or even, as a general rule, for proper ends. Even when his heart was swollen with rage, as it frequently was — and as it always was when he heard the villagers’ slanderous talk — he kept himself tightly reined in and merely counted to ten, or to a hundred, or to a thousand, or to whatever proved necessary. Walking down the street, keeping close to the curb, where he could easily step off into the gutter if some villager should desire to pass, he would listen to their slanders and be so furious that his eyes, lifeless no longer, would bulge and fill with boiling hot tears.

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